Those Endearing Young Charms (4 page)

* * * *

Mary Anstey sat in the quiet of the church and prayed desperately for faith, strength, and hope to go through with her marriage. After a time, she became aware of someone kneeling beside her. She tried to concentrate on her prayers, but she was plagued with the ridiculous idea that the person beside her could read her thoughts.

She rose to her feet.

"Miss Anstey."

Her silent companion in prayer had been Mr. Cummings.

"Mr. Cummings. It is a fine day, is it not? Our guests are seeing the countryside at its best."

"Yes," said Mr Cummings brightly, thinking of the bare, muddy fields outside and the skeletal branches of the winter trees.

"There is so much confusion and turmoil at home with all the preparations for the wedding," Mary rushed on, "that I felt I had to come here for some peace."

"And help?"

"Yes, naturally. One is always in need of spiritual guidance, no matter how ... h-how h-happy one is." And with that, Mary sat down again and burst into tears.

"Please, don't," begged Mr. Cummings, running his hands through his stiff hair so that it stood up in spikes. "I cannot bear to see you in such distress. I know. You are worried about the wedding. Young brides are often so."

Mary dried her eyes very carefully and said in a flat little voice, "I don't love him. He frightens me."

"Ah!" Mr. Cummings let out a long breath and sat down beside her.

"He is not the man I knew," Mary went on. "He has changed. He is hard and cold. He frightens me."

"My dear Miss Anstey! The wedding must be called off. You must not go through with it."

"Yes, I must. I have a duty to my parents. This marriage means so much to them. So very much. I know they seem worldly and silly, but they are very kind."

"They were not very kind when they did not allow you to marry Devenham in the first place."

"They thought they were doing the best thing," Mary said wretchedly. One large tear rolled down her cheek and clung to a glossy brown curl, where it hung and shimmered in the candlelight of the church.

"I was very young. They thought I did not know my mind. And, oh, they were right! I have lived on dreams. He was so young and eager and unsure of himself when he was Captain Tracey, so gentle and kind. Now he is hard and demanding and overbearing."

"You are become quite white," said Mr. Cummings. "Let us walk in the churchyard a little. The fresh air will make you feel better."

"I do not think anything will make me feel better," sighed Mary, but she allowed him to lead her out of the church and into the hard wind and glitter of the day outside.

They walked around the back of the church to where the tall, silent tombstones stood silhouetted against the pale blue sky.

"I do not know what to say to comfort you, Miss Anstey," said Mr. Cummings. He leaned one square, dependable hand against a dropsical-looking marble cherub with a face of ageless evil. "Any man would wish to marry you." He struck the cherub with his fist. "_Any_ man. If I had the right.... but I must not say more. I should have spoken before this, but it all seemed hopeless. I knew you were waiting for him -- waiting and longing -- as I, too, have waited and longed."

Mary turned and looked at him, pity and amazement in her tear-washed eyes.

"I did not know, Mr. Cummings, that there was some young lady who...."

Her voice died away before the blaze of love in his eyes.

For a long moment they stood looking at each other, Mr. Cummings with hopeless love and Mary with a dawning awareness of that love.

Wonderingly she raised a hand to his cheek and he grasped it, and, turning it over, pressed a kiss into the palm.

"There," he said in a ragged voice. "My secret is out. A fine man of God I am, Miss Anstey. Instead of lightening your burden, I am adding to it."

"Oh, no," said Mary sadly. "I did not know. But I know now, and it is a knowledge I will treasure always."

She turned and walked away around the side of the church.

There was nothing Peter Cummings could do but watch her disappear and think of the nightmare before him. In a few days' time he would be marrying the love of his life to another man.

* * * *

The wedding rehearsal took place the following day. The bride-to-be was wan and shaken. The groom-to-be was curt to the point of rudeness, and snarled his responses. Emily Anstey was worried to death.

To her, it seemed glaringly plain that somehow or other Mr. Cummings had declared his love, and gentle Mary in her turn had fallen head over heels in love with the vicar.

"Of course, only I can know that," thought Emily. "Mary is so ill-looking, everyone else must surely think she has bride-nerves. Oh, dear, I must do something to stop this wedding. I don't care if Devenham is humiliated again. He _deserves_ to be humiliated, the great, arrogant brute! See how he glares at poor Mary."

It was a relief when the rehearsal was over and the Earl of Devenham curtly refused an invitation to supper, saying he had matters to discuss with Arthur Chester.

"What's amiss?" Mr. Arthur Chester asked curiously, once he and the earl were seated in the inn over a bowl of steaming punch. "You are in a nasty mood."

"She don't want me," said the earl abruptly.

"Then don't have her!"

"Oh, she'll get used to me in time. One woman is much like t'other. But I refuse to be turned down again by the Ansteys -- and all because their hen-witted daughter has fallen in love with the vicar."

"My dear boy!"

"I am not blind, you know."

"Then call it off!"

"No," said the earl stubbornly. "I loved that girl with all my heart and I shall come to love her again.

And she, me! When the Ansteys with their monumental vulgarity told me ten years ago that I was not good enough for their daughter, I longed to make them eat their words. I longed to return in triumph and have them crawl at my feet."

"How gothic! Well, you have returned and nobody could crawl more. Leave her waiting at the altar.

That way you will humiliate them the more, she can marry her vicar, and everything will be right and tight."

The earl looked at his friend's thin, dark, mobile face with great irritation.

"You make it all sound so easy. Just up and run. I have my pride. I have sworn to marry the girl, and marry her I will."

Mr. Chester twisted his neck uncomfortably. He was wearing the latest thing in high stiff collars --

called patricides -- and wished his laundress had not been quite so generous with the starch.

He was in fact Colonel Chester, late of the 10th Dragoons, but since he had retired from the army, he had dropped his military title and had sworn he did not even want to see a uniform again.

He was small in stature, with olive skin and a great beak of a nose. He was of a romantic turn of mind and had eagerly traveled to Malden Grand to see his friend marry the girl he had waited for for so long. He was disappointed to find this particular romance on the verge of such an unhappy ending.

"Well, don't you see," he ventured cautiously, "she's a pretty little thing and very shy. You're so used to ordering men around and fighting battles, well, no one could say you've got a gentle touch with the fair sex. Pity you wasn't marrying the younger gel. Lots of fire there."

"Miss Emily Anstey is a minx," said the earl coldly. "I like my ladies to behave like ladies. Do you know she had the temerity to waylay me at this inn and tell me that neither I nor her sister was in love."

"Can't say I blame her for that. She had the right of it."

The earl poured himself a glass of punch. He suddenly remembered his arrival at The Elms. For a few brief, glorious moments, his return had been all he had ever dreamed it would be. _That_ was what he had dreamed of all these long years. Not revenge. Warm lips, pliant body, surging senses.

When he had taken Mary for a drive, he had reined in his horses and taken her in his arms to kiss her. She had trembled at his touch, and her lips had been very cold, and her whole body had seemed to shrink from him. Damn that minx, Emily. Had it not been for the warmth of _her_ response, Mary's withdrawal would have seemed the natural response of a virginal lady.

"She's a doxy!" he said savagely.

"Not Miss Anstey!"

"Never mind. It was someone else. The wedding is tomorrow. The guests are all here, and I'll just have to go through with it."

* * * *

"You can't go through with it!" Emily Anstey said passionately, on the eve of the wedding.

Her sister raised a tear-stained face from the pillow. "I must."

"He doesn't love you," said Emily firmly. "Mr. Cummings does."

"Oh, don't. Oh, that I had never known. Go away, Emily."

"Listen!" said Emily urgently, edging closer to her sister on the bed. "Do you remember two years ago when we played that trick? I put on a brown wig, and you a blond one. We went to the assembly as each other. We fooled everyone, even Mama and Papa! I will go tomorrow as you, and you will go as me. He will marry the wrong sister, and since I will make my vows as _Mary_ Anstey, the marriage will not be legal, and he will be so shocked he will go away and never see us again. I read such a thing in _Lady Jane's Dilemma._ She was to marry...."

Mary sat up in bed and stared wide-eyed at her sister. "I have never heard of such a _criminal_

idea," she gasped. "Peregrine would _shoot_ me. Now, leave me alone this instant and don't let me hear you talk such fustian again. No! Not another word."

Emily went to her own room and sat in a chair by the window, watching the patterns the rush-light made on the ceiling.

Somehow the marriage must be stopped. Now just suppose she, Emily, managed to drug Mary.

While Mary slept, she could put the blond wig on her head and go downstairs in the brown wig, pretend to be Mary, and say that Emily was so ill she could not attend the wedding. That dim, myopic cousin, Bertha, would be delighted to be elected bridesmaid.

The earl would be furious with her, would take out his wrath on her, but he would not blame Mary.

So Mary could then marry Mr. Cummings, because after the disgrace, papa would let Mary marry _anybody._ Thank goodness no one had heard of her visit to the earl at The Green Man.

Emily began to plot and plan. It was no use drugging Mary now. She might have slept off the effects by the morning. Better to take her her morning chocolate. Emily groaned. She found it very hard to wake up early even at the best of times.

"Then you will just have to sit up all night, miss," Emily told herself severely. "By morning, you will look every bit as wan and pale as Mary."

A picture of the earl's furious, arrogant face rose before Emily's eyes, and she shuddered. But Mary must be saved at all costs. Mary had suffered enough and should suffer no more.

Setting her lips in a stubborn line, Emily lit the candles, picked up a romance, and prepared to wait out the night.

* * * *

It was a blessing that the Anstey sisters' lady's maid was new to the job. Their former lady's maid had recently retired with a good pension. The current one, Felice, a black-eyed French girl whose sole interest in life seemed to be the second footman, dressed her charges in an efficient but impersonal way, and, Emily was sure, had never studied them closely enough to tell them apart.

Emily had drugged Mary's morning chocolate with laudanum, placed the blonde wig on her sister's head, and drawn the covers up about her face.

Attired in the brown wig and with her lively features carefully schooled to copy Mary's demure expression, Emily was sure that with the help of the thick white veil which went with the wedding dress, she could easily pass for her sister.

As soon as Mary had drunk the drugged chocolate and gone back to sleep, Emily told Felice to inform Mama that "Emily" was too ill to attend and to take the bridesmaid's gown to Cousin Bertha with the plea that Bertha perform Emily's part during the service.

Although it was not yet time to get dressed, Emily then urged Felice to help her into the white silk wedding gown, trimmed with seed pearls and Valencienne lace, so that she was gowned and veiled by the time Mrs. Anstey came upstairs to look at poor "Emily" and wonder what Emily was doing sleeping in Mary's room.

Emily gave her mother a long tale of nighttime headaches and sickness and said that "Emily" had begged to be allowed to rest and would join the family at the wedding celebrations.

Mrs. Anstey tiptoed into Mary's room and gazed down anxiously at the sleeping figure on the bed, while Emily fretted, hoping that her mother would not draw back the covers and guess that the girl in bed was not Emily.

The enormity of what she was about to do did not really strike Emily. She set her sister's happiness far above the haughty earl's humiliation and far above any embarrassment to the Anstey family.

She was also living in a dream world, playing out the part of a heroine in a novel. In fact, when all was discovered, Emily planned to faint, quite in the best manner, because surely no one would rant and curse an unconscious girl.

She prayed and prayed that her mother would stay away until the time came to set out for the church, but Mrs. Anstey considered it her duty to hint delicately at the mysteries of the marriage bed.

Fortunately, this caused the good lady so much anguish and embarrassment that she looked anywhere in the room but at Emily.

All at once it was time to leave. Flushed with excitement at appearing in the limelight for once in her life, Cousin Bertha looked feverish and animated, her long nose pink with excitement. Her gown was rather full in the bust for her flat figure, but she had solved that problem by stuffing her reticule down the front.

As Emily stood at the entrance to the church, leaning on her father's arm, she suddenly felt sick with dread. As she looked at the glowing pride on her father's face, her conscience gave her such a sharp stab that she nearly cried aloud.

But, somehow, it was too late to turn back. The church door was open, the organ was playing, and her father began to lead her forward.

She approached the altar with her head meekly bowed, wishing her veil were thicker.